For years, the standard account of Bangladesh’s foreign policy read as an exercise in equilibrium: a poor but strategically located country threading the needle between an assertive China, a wary India, and a United States mostly interested in garments and geopolitics. That framing is no longer adequate. Since February 2026, Bangladesh has been governed by a Bangladesh Nationalist Party administration under Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, and in the space of a few months it has signed a defence-adjacent economic package with Beijing, absorbed a new round of American tariffs, and watched New Delhi quietly cut its aid budget in half. The balancing act described in general terms is now a set of specific, dated decisions – and each one is narrowing Dhaka’s room to hedge.
From Interim drift to a BNP government
The current phase begins with the collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s government in mid-2024 and the year and a half of interim rule under Muhammad Yunus that followed. That period was marked by a sharp deterioration in relations with India – including visa restrictions and curbs on transhipment and market access – even as ties with Beijing and Islamabad deepened. Bangladesh’s February 12, 2026 election brought the BNP to power under Rahman, who inherited, by multiple accounts, a fragile economy, a polarized political landscape, and a relationship with India that his government has said it wants to repair even as it moves on other fronts. Notably, India itself stepped back from the kind of proactive electoral involvement it had exercised in the past, a shift analysts have linked to New Delhi’s own recalibration of how much political capital to spend on Dhaka.
The Beijing sequence
Rahman’s first overseas trip as prime minister was telling in its routing: Kuala Lumpur, then Beijing, with New Delhi conspicuously absent. Over four days in late June, his government concluded roughly 15 to 17 memoranda of understanding with China – reporting varies on the exact count – spanning trade, investment, connectivity, artificial intelligence, green technology and the China-Myanmar-Bangladesh Economic Corridor, alongside a joint communiqué elevating ties to what Beijing termed a “community with a shared future.” China pledged close to $300 million in grant assistance and the two sides agreed to explore a 2+2 dialogue mechanism bringing together foreign and defence officials – not a formal alliance, but a step that regional commentary has flagged as normalizing far closer security coordination than Dhaka has had with any other partner.
Bangladeshi officials, including Rahman himself, have publicly resisted the framing of the trip as a pivot away from India, describing it instead as pragmatic economic diplomacy consistent with a “Bangladesh First” doctrine of non-alignment. Independent observers are split on how much weight that framing can bear.
Teesta: Where infrastructure becomes strategy
The most politically loaded outcome of the visit involves the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project, a scheme Bangladesh has pursued for over a decade to manage flooding, irrigation and navigation in its northern districts. Rahman raised the project directly with China’s water resources minister in Beijing, and Bangladesh’s foreign secretary has since drawn a careful distinction between reviewing the project’s feasibility with China and formally accepting Chinese financing for it – a distinction that leaves Dhaka’s options open while still signalling to New Delhi that Bangladesh has an alternative if bilateral Teesta talks, stalled for roughly fifteen years, continue to go nowhere. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson used a press briefing during the visit to explicitly wave off Indian anxieties, insisting China-Bangladesh cooperation is not directed at any third country. Indian analysts have not been reassured: commentary out of New Delhi’s strategic community treats any Chinese footprint near the Teesta basin, so close to the Siliguri Corridor connecting India’s northeast to the mainland, as a first-order security concern rather than a purely economic one.
The J-10CE question
Running alongside the economic MoUs is a defence procurement story that may prove more consequential still. Bangladesh is reportedly finalizing the purchase of 20 to 24 Chinese-made J-10CE multirole fighters – a deal potentially worth around $2.2 billion, structured with financing spread over roughly a decade, and timed for possible signature by August 2026. If completed, Bangladesh would become only the second air force in the world after Pakistan’s to field the aircraft, a fact Indian defence commentary has read as a genuine complication for Indian Air Force planning, since it would introduce a second China-aligned fighter fleet on India’s periphery and add pressure to force-allocation decisions that already have to account for Pakistan. The deal builds on a defence relationship in which Bangladesh is already among the largest global recipients of Chinese military hardware, and it is emerging at the same moment Dhaka is discussing a more formal defence dialogue with Beijing – two tracks reinforcing each other rather than developing in isolation.
Washington’s parallel, Rockier track
If China has offered Dhaka grants and hardware, Washington has offered something considerably more transactional and, this year, more volatile. Bangladesh’s apparel sector – its dominant export earner to the US market – was hit with a 37 percent reciprocal tariff in April 2025, cut to 20 percent by August, then formalized in February 2026 under a US-Bangladesh Agreement on Reciprocal Trade that brought the rate down to 19 percent with a conditional zero-tariff channel for apparel using American cotton or fiber inputs. That relief proved partial: in June and July 2026, Washington layered on an additional tariff tied to a forced-labor investigation covering 60 countries, pushing Bangladesh’s total garment duty to roughly 25.6 percent even though Dhaka’s 10 percent increment was lower than the 12.5 percent applied to countries without a reciprocal trade agreement already in place. Bangladeshi industry figures have pushed back on the forced-labor rationale, noting the country stopped importing Chinese cotton years ago, while manufacturers privately worry about order flight to competitors. On the security side, Reuters reported as early as February 2026 that Washington was preparing to offer Bangladesh’s incoming government defence alternatives to Chinese systems – evidence that the US views the procurement competition, not just the trade relationship, as the more durable lever.
New Delhi’s retreat, Not defeat
India’s response so far has been more budgetary than rhetorical. New Delhi’s 2026-27 union budget cut development assistance to Dhaka by half, from 120 crore to 60 crore rupees, continuing a pattern of slower disbursement tied to India’s own frustrations over the treatment of religious minorities and the broader trajectory of the bilateral relationship. Strategic analysts in Delhi, including Smruti Pattanaik of the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, have characterized the Beijing visit as a warning signal rather than a strategic rout, arguing India’s concerns will concentrate on three concrete things going forward: the Teesta project, port and connectivity infrastructure such as Mongla, and any future defence or dual-use cooperation – rather than on the symbolism of the trip itself. Other Indian commentary has been blunter, describing the sequencing of Rahman’s itinerary as confirmation that the hyper-dependence on India cultivated under the previous Awami League government has ended, and that New Delhi’s eastern flank now requires the kind of sustained intelligence and diplomatic investment it has not had to make in over a decade.
The capacity constraint nobody can legislate away
The least dramatic but perhaps most important variable is simply whether Bangladesh has the state capacity to manage simultaneous relationships with three powers whose interests genuinely conflict. Domestic commentary, including in the Daily Star, has drawn an explicit comparison to Vietnam, which sustains a close US security relationship alongside heavy Chinese investment because it has the bureaucratic and industrial absorption capacity to do both. Bangladesh, by contrast, spends nearly half of its foreign aid on servicing existing external debt exceeding $4 billion a year, and its own officials have acknowledged that slow, bureaucratic project execution — not a shortage of foreign offers – is the binding constraint on turning any of these agreements, Chinese or American, into delivered outcomes.
The structural question
What is being tested in Bangladesh right now is not simply which power Dhaka prefers, but whether a “Bangladesh First” doctrine of engaging all sides can survive contact with a fighter-jet purchase, a shared-future communiqué, and a tariff regime that changes every few months. The Rahman government’s insistence that none of this amounts to alignment is not obviously wrong, but it depends on a capacity for simultaneous hedging that Bangladesh has not yet demonstrated it possesses – and on India’s willingness to treat budgetary and diplomatic distance as sufficient response to developments its own security establishment is describing as a genuine frontier vulnerability. Both assumptions will be tested well before the J-10CE ink is dry.
